Orchestrating the orderly completion of nearly any project or endeavor of more than modest complexity and which takes collaborative effort invariably requires the definition and management of a workflow. Simply put, a workflow can be thought of as constituting a series of sequentially- or successively-occurring steps, processes or statuses, where the series is initiated at some defined point in the workflow and is terminated at some point later in the workflow. A simple workflow defines a single unidirectional flow of steps, each step following from the prior step, with only a single point of initiation and a single point of termination. More complex workflows may have multiple points of initiation and termination, could spawn out-of-band (independent) processes or sub-workflows, and may include unidirectional, bidirectional or circular flows, and conditional criteria that direct the workflow along divergent courses that can run in tandem or completely different directions than earlier steps or, if an out-of-band process has been spawned, along independent yet parallel workflow paths. Still other forms of workflows and control are possible.
Workflows are frequently encountered in the approval process followed by an administrative agency or other organization or bureaucracy that is charged with ensuring adherence to and compliance with a regulatory scheme or other set of rules or fixed criteria. Administrative procedure generally requires the agency to follow a systematic process of step-by-step intake and review, which typically includes checking incoming submissions or applications for completeness, setting project deadlines, requesting additional information from the applicant as necessary, communicating the status of the submission, coordinating each submission with the stakeholders within the agency that are charged with enforcing different aspects of the regulatory scheme or with other entities or third parties as appropriate, generating documentation, running reports, and chronicling the outcomes of each step of the review process before an interim or final disposition is assigned, whether under review, approved, denied, suspended, withdrawn, and so forth. Other review steps and outcomes are possible.
Before undertaking a new project, an applicant will ordinarily be asked to make a formal submission or application in writing when seeking to gain the agency's approval. A complete submission is expected to proceed through the review process and actions may be automatically triggered when the submission reaches certain steps in the review process. Some steps in the review process may cause the submission to branch or fork in a different direction of review based upon the nature of the submission, a finding by a stakeholder, or some other factor. As well, at any point, the applicant may decide to withdraw the submission entirely or make a change that requires reinitiating or revisiting part or all of the review process. If all of the necessary reviews are satisfactorily completed, the submission will ordinarily be granted approval; otherwise, the submission will either be denied or, when appropriate, may remain under review until either withdrawn by the applicant, or canceled or suspended by the agency. Other interim and final dispositions from the review process are possible.
Workflows are widely used outside the dominion of administrative agency procedure and can be found in nearly any field of endeavor that requires step-by-step process completion. For instance, roughly speaking, the manufacturing of a product requires steps of creating an initial design, fabrication or acquisition of constituent components, final assembly, and packaging. Similarly, real estate sales require the steps of disclosures, inspections, loan approval, funds release, escrow, closing, and title recordation. Workflows can even be found in non-business related activities, such as wedding planning, which requires the booking of various venues, coordination of the services provided by different vendors, and careful scheduling well in advance of the blessed event.
Workflows are not static and changes to the enabling regulatory scheme or other set of rules or fixed criteria can trigger modifications to or the revamping of a workflow. Virtually all aspects of a workflow are subject to change, including the form and entry point of submissions, the individual steps undertaken by stakeholders and others, the flow and conditions that submissions follow in navigating through the review process, and the situations under which the review process may be overridden. Often, an administrative agency will be bound to honor the workflow in existence at the time that a submission was received, if even temporarily, such as when a submission is “grandfathered.” However, other forms of workflow are not so encumbered and submissions caught in the wheels of change may need to be revised or shuffled about in the review process.
Existing approaches to workflow modeling focus on a serialization of steps flowing in a unidirectional manner. For instance, the Workflowfirst product, licensed by Riaform Technology, Thiells, N.Y., provides a graphical user interface in which the routing of forms can be specified. The routing is defined in a hierarchical fashion and step-by-step flow is enforced.
Therefore, a need remains for an interactive tool for defining and managing a complex workflow.